Erik Haagensen

“The Trip to Bountiful” is an American treasure, and Wilson and his wonderful company show us why in this not-to-be-missed production.

That Fiona Shaw is a force of nature is indisputable. As a very human Virgin Mary in playwright Colm Tóibín's 90-minute monologue 'The Testament of Mary,' Shaw prowls about Tom Pye's object-strewn set declaiming her lines in everything from a whisper to a shriek and all stops in between while jangling large metal nails, hurling a hefty wooden ladder this way and that, stripping naked and plunging out of sight into a pool of water, and even at one point conveying a large yellow-beaked black vulture offstage. Working with longtime collaborator Deborah Warner as her director, Shaw is never less than a compelling presence. I'm not convinced, however, that all the symbolic clutter is the best elucidation of Tóibín's simple, moving deconstruction of one of the world's most beloved religious icons.

When I saw the original Off-Broadway production of Lyle Kessler's 'Orphans' back in 1985, I found the play to be a tiresome mix of pilfered Pinter and stolen Shepard...Nearly 30 years later the play is getting its Broadway debut, but time hasn't altered my assessment. 'Orphans' remains as synthetic as ever, only now Tom Sturridge, Ben Foster, and Alec Baldwin do the bravura thesping...In a fearlessly physical turn, Sturridge gives Phillip sweetness and vulnerability, emphasizing his all-but-smothered intelligence and wide-eyed desire to learn. Foster's Treat is at first a boiling cauldron of rage, his lid ready to blow at the slightest provocation...Broadway veteran Baldwin snaps with paternal authority as Harold and is amusingly sentimental in the man's desire to help these two boys...The actor misses, however, the edgy sense of menace that Mahoney brought to the role.

The bill for stage smoke must be a big one over at the Marquis Theatre. The stuff billows forth in unrelenting profusion during director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun's expressionistic, would-be steampunk revival of 'Jekyll & Hyde'...Unfortunately, it never achieves the critical mass necessary to obscure the proceedings...Neither Maroulis, as Dr. Henry Jekyll and his evil twin Edward Hyde, nor Cox, as London prostitute Lucy Harris, is a stranger to the Broadway stage, which shows in their committed performances. That they are one-note performances is the fault of the writing, not the stars. Both struggle with uncomfortable-sounding English accents, which they happily divest themselves of when singing-and boy can they sing.

Douglas Carter Beane's 'The Nance' is a bold, brave play, in which this eminent theatrical boulevardier reaches for something deeper and darker. Chronicling Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia's crusade to wipe out burlesque, accomplished in part by the persecution of gay people, in 1937 New York City, the show offers taut direction from Jack O'Brien and a tour de force turn from the brilliant Nathan Lane. So it's with great regret that I have to say that Beane's yin-and-yang mix of low comedy and high tragedy, the personal and the political, never meshes.

...the show stuffs 67 songs into its two-hour-and-45-minute running time. Such abundance suggests that impresario Berry Gordy-who created the fabulously successful music factory and has written and produced this entertainment about its history-has strong convictions about what his audience wants. If you are looking to bathe in nostalgia evoked by beloved tunes while watching talented and committed professionals do their industrious best to locate the magic of legendary performers, this is the show for you. If you prefer a well-written story with multidimensional characters that digs beneath the surface and uses song with dramatic acumen, then steer clear.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' rushes at you from the stage of the Shubert Theatre-often literally-with the relentlessness of a high-speed rail train. Director Matthew Warchus' meticulously calculated production offers coup after coup de théâtre as it tells Dahl's fantastical tale of a 5-year-old girl who's a genius, the idiot family that mistreats her, the sadistic headmistress who terrorizes her, and the loving teacher who comes to her aid. The show is strenuously entertaining, as dark as it is funny, and just a tad cold.

There's no use putting up a fight with 'Kinky Boots.' The Broadway adaptation of the hit 2005 Miramax film about a struggling shoe factory in the north of England and the drag queens who help to save it is the feel-good musical of the season. Yes, Harvey Fierstein's funny book is a bit too bald, Cyndi Lauper's catchy songs are more lyrically repetitive than they should be, and director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell slights character and story in favor of splashy production numbers. Still, boasting a powerhouse performance from Billy Porter as Lola, the drag queen who's also a trained boxer, the damn thing works.

Nora Ephron's posthumously produced 'Lucky Guy' is a breezy but thin account of the life and career of New York City reporter and columnist Mike McAlary. Film star Tom Hanks, in his Broadway debut and first stage appearance in more than 30 years, displays potent theatrical technique and dispenses the requisite charisma as the bombastic newspaper flack. Audiences primed for seeing Hanks in the flesh probably won't care about the flimsiness of his vehicle and the reams of rat-a-tat-tat narration that shackle it.

After watching S.R. Bindler's 1997 documentary 'Hands on a Hard Body'-about a 1994 Texas contest in which people stand around a Nissan truck while always keeping one hand on it, and the last left upright wins the vehicle-I shook my head and thought, 'I just don't see it.' Nevertheless, many a good musical has been born out of apparently unpromising material. Now that I've experienced 'Hands on a Hardbody'...I still haven't seen it. The tuner coarsens its self-effacing, quietly observant source with cheesy soap-opera backstories, forced Lifetime-movie subplotting, and self-righteous hot-button-issue pressing in an obviously manipulative attempt to stir our emotions. Padded out with an unnecessary intermission and extraneous songs to nearly two-and-a-half hours, the proceedings rarely come to life.

Playwright Richard Greenberg has adapted Truman Capote's novella 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' for the theater with remarkable fidelity-and that's the problem. Capote's wispy memory tale, told principally in carefully carved prose, may be hypnotic on the page, but it's dull onstage, with too much narration and not enough drama. Greenberg and director Sean Mathias haven't rethought it in theatrical terms. Add to that a game but awfully artificial performance by Emilia Clarke as Holly Golightly, and it's enough to give you a case of the mean reds.

It has taken 30 producers to bring Christopher Durang's six-character, one-set comedy 'Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike' to the Great White Way, and all I can say is God bless them, every one. A sold-out hit Off-Broadway for Lincoln Center Theater this past fall, it is easily the best new play of the Main Stem season to date and a top contender for the Tony Award. Both breathtakingly funny and quietly poignant, this Chekhov-inspired work-for which knowledge of the Russian master's plays is not a requirement-is pure joy from start to finish.

Ashford's awkward, excessively physical staging includes far too much unimaginative circling of Brick and Maggie's dominating bed. Though Williams does mandate things such as the offstage singing of field hands, Ashford ham-fistedly employs Adam Cork's busy sound design, especially in the too-obvious use of some punctuating fireworks. Ashford also begins and ends each act with Cork's crashing music cranked up high, as if to create by fiat the searing drama that he has been unable to unlock in the play. Williams should be allowed to make his own music.

The best work comes from Ben Rappaport, as Alan; Ellen Burstyn, as widowed neighbor Helen Potts; and especially the terrific Mare Winningham, as Madge and Millie's anxious mother, Flo. Rappaport ably captures Alan's light self-confidence and straight-arrow wholesomeness alongside his unappealing but unconscious objectification of Madge. Burstyn's Helen is appropriately self-effacing and sweetly rejuvenated as Hal's presence reminds her that she can still experience feelings she thought were gone forever.

Once again guided faultlessly by director Joe Mantello, the production has been expertly expanded to fill the larger space without sacrificing intimacy or nuance. Laurie Metcalf returns to offer her galvanizing portrayal of Dr. Juliana Smithton, a dementia specialist suddenly faced with the condition herself, and Metcalf's shattering work has only gotten richer. Bold, unflinching, and ingeniously constructed, this is a show not to be missed.

David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for drama, was on Broadway a mere seven years ago, in a terrific production directed by Joe Mantello and produced by Jeffrey Richards. So why has Richards brought the show back so soon? One has to assume it's the desire of star and Mamet vet Al Pacino to play Shelley Levene, the anxious-to-be-back-in-the-game real estate salesman at the drama's center. In Daniel Sullivan's unevenly directed production, Pacino entertainingly holds the stage, winning laugh after laugh, but he makes a miscalculation fatal to the play's core.

In these days of the small-cast, tidy domestic drama, what a pleasure it is to encounter Clifford Odets’ soaring, expansive, and tough-as-nails “Golden Boy,”...A sumptuously talented cast of 19 digs into the tale of would-be violinist Joe Bonaparte, who forsakes music in favor of a high-stakes career as a boxer for monetary reasons…Joe is fueled by a rage he can neither articulate nor comprehend, and the extraordinary Seth Numrich makes that central to his knockout performance...Space limitations forbid me saluting all the fine turns in the company. At the top of the heap is Tony Shalhoub’s decent, courtly, and finally devastated Mr. Bonaparte. Yvonne Strahovski shines as the sullen Lorna, holding her own in a man’s world with engaging feistiness...Danny Mastrogiorgio gets Moody’s self-doubt and sweaty hunger for success exactly right, while Anthony Crivello makes a welcome return to the New York stage as Fuseli, scarily psychopathic and shot through with latent erotic desire.

There’s the deadly whiff of self-congratulatory pretension hovering in the air at the Golden Theatre, where David Mamet’s latest play, “The Anarchist,” is occupying the stage. Inert and pedantic, more studied than any sentence Henry James ever wrote, this two-hander about the parole hearing of a political dissident jailed for 35 years for the murder of two police officers lasts for 60 interminable minutes (the production, no doubt worried about bang for the buck, claims 70 minutes, but that’s because it starts 10 minutes late). Mamet takes a potentially juicy situation and drains it of all humanity and drama. “The Anarchist” is a droning, pompous essay brought to unnatural life.

Prolific playwright Theresa Rebeck is on a downward spiral with her Broadway offerings. The problematic but interesting “Mauritius” was followed by the flashy but empty “Seminar,” and now there’s “Dead Accounts,” the lazy and predictable comedy at the Music Box Theatre that wouldn’t even pass muster as a Lifetime movie. Indeed, its presence on the Great White Way would be inexplicable without film star Katie Holmes in the cast, in an undemanding role that any number of actors could have played...Under Jack O’Brien’s just-go-for-it direction, Norbert Leo Butz works feverishly to make something out of Jack, employing his spectacular gift for physical comedy while infusing Jack’s rants with musicality and as much conviction as he can summon. Unfortunately, there’s no there there, and this talented actor’s work is reduced to a bag of tricks...Rebeck was once a promising, obviously talented writer. In her quest for Broadway success, I fear that she may have locked her soul away in its own dead account.

Evan Cabnet does little but direct traffic as Jenni Barber (Sundown), Daniel Breaker (Lee), Ari Graynor (Peeps), Cheyenne Jackson (Mandrew), Alicia Silverstone (Sara), and Henry Winkler (Chuck) soldier manically on. The only thing they can be blamed for is signing on in the first place.

Director Scott Ellis’ edition is brisker and brighter than Wilford Leach’s original, most notably in the performances of Will Chase and Betsy Wolfe as Jasper and Rosa. Chase opts for energetic mustache-twirling and Wolfe sticks with innocent and virginal, though both sing powerfully. In the pants role of Drood, Stephanie Block cavorts with a winking manliness and employs her spectacular voice authoritatively, though she lacks originator Betty Buckley’s sharp edge. Jessie Mueller and Andy Karl milk Helena and Neville’s cartoon exoticism for big laughs, and Gregg Edelman dithers appropriately as Crisparkle. Best are the elegantly authentic Jim Norton, absolutely the equal of the peerless George Rose as the troupe’s leader and our host, and, as Puffer, the playful Chita Rivera, who knows in her bones how to do a star turn despite the worst cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke. The audience I saw “Drood” with adored it, and I suspect most will, so hooray for Roundabout. Alas, the show still makes my teeth hurt.

I suppose it’s possible that “Cyrano” traditionalists will not be as taken with Lloyd’s interpretation as I was. Nevertheless, I would urge everyone to check out Roundabout Theatre Company’s thoughtful, committed production.

'Bring It On: The Musical' aspires to be nothing more than a frothy distraction with just a hint of that time-honored moral 'Winning isn't everything.' This wisp of cotton candy about a high school cheerleading competition is 'inspired' by the Universal Pictures film franchise of the same title. Aimed squarely at teenage girls and designed to tour the country, the show would probably feel more at home at Madison Square Garden than on the stage of the St. James Theatre.

Elwood is a role that has attracted a host of stars, from its originator, the vaudevillian Frank Fay, to Stewart, who replaced Fay in the original Broadway run and starred in the 1950 film, and Art Carney, of 'The Honeymooners' fame, who played it on TV in 1958. Jim Parsons isn't much like any of those gentlemen, but he makes Elwood his own in an impressive turn. Chase describes Elwood as 'dignified' yet 'dreamy,' 'benign' yet 'serious,' and Parsons takes her at her word with wonderful stylization while adding just the slightest touch of dry humor. He is so convincing in his give-and-take with Harvey that we almost begin to see the mischievous sprite. Parsons stresses Elwood's concern for others and generosity of spirit, undergirding it with a touch of steel. He's terrific.

You know you're in trouble at 'Leap of Faith' even before the show starts, when actors pretending to be revivalists distribute what are supposed to be dollar bills to the audience, so we will have something to put in the collection basket when it's passed. How many phony preachers distribute money to the audiences they plan to fleece? It makes about as much sense as this ersatz musical does, which, like its cinematic source, is a compendium of formulaic characters and clichéd situations all too obviously cribbed from better and more original works. Bathed in composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater's generic score and driven to an artificial frenzy by Christopher Ashley's desperately meta direction and Sergio Trujillo's repetitive choreography, the show is busy, empty, and, worst of all, boring.